Images via noblepr.
The Viewer is watching Borgen.
Category: TV & Film
Aurora, Colorado: Pathology Of A Tragedy
Image: REUTERS/Fred Prouser.
Having spent the last 200,000 years trying to eliminate danger and fear from our lives, human beings recently decided that an existence without the chemical highs and lows experienced during peril was boring.
Being smart, we harnessed technology to provoke extremes of emotion within safe environments. We call it entertainment, and is essentially a stimulant to sensation without consequences.
It’s great, and we are very clever.
The Viewer: Alan Partridge, The End Of The Affair
Images via walesonline, partridgewikia.
It happened.
The Viewer is devastated to report that after eighteen years of watching Alan Partridge flounder his way through the wreckage of his life, it has stopped being funny for her.
A period of mourning will be announced shortly.
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The Viewer: Geordie Shore, Chaos In Cancun
Image via tumblr.
You might think you are above watching appalling trash such as this, but a true intellectual knows that ALL information about one’s fellow man is valuable.
To date, no one has managed to prove or indeed put forth any evidence to support the validity of that assertion, but no matter. These people have in excess of 3m Twitter followers between them. They’re taking over the world.
This will help you communicate with them until you work out an escape plan.
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Katie Holmes: Escape Is Futile
Image: FameFlynet Pictures.
I know I’m with the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with… I won’t let this woman get away.
Literal or figurative? We’re going to find out now, aren’t we…
Mission To Lars: High Concept Hopes & Dreams
Kate Spicer is a journalist and broadcaster. Her brother Tom suffers from Fragile X syndrome – a form of learning disability – and as a consequence, Kate and her other brother Will felt that they lost touch with him as they grew up. Tom lives in a care home in Devon now, while Kate and Will are both pursuing careers in London.
In order to make up for those years where, as Kate puts it, “we’ve been rubbish with him” with him, they decided to help Tom fulfill his greatest wish – to meet Lars Ulrich of the metal band, Metallica.
What followed was a journey in which their best laid plans began to unravel before they’d even left the UK. Kate and Will filmed it all, and the result of their endeavour is out now.
It sounds like a cross between This Is Spinal Tap and Rain Man. I can’t wait.
Charlie Brooker: The Final Piece Of The Puzzle
Sebastian Bergman and Torkel Hoglund approach a house, intent on the capture of a smug, subtitle-reading git. Image via moviemail-online.co.uk.
The sense of intellectual superiority available in subtitled entertainment is a wonderful thing. In fact, it’s so good that waiting to see whether a subtle yet contemptuous forehead crease or attack as a form of defence response follows the question “which version of ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ have you seen?” could arguably be broadened into an entertainment format of it’s own.
Seeing both doesn’t count. In order to be a proper intellectual, one eschews the remake as a needless exercise in pandering to the lowest common denominator. But, being a clever sort, you knew that.
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AA Gill: Refined, But Essentially Still A Troll
AA Gill. You’d be laughing too, if you got paid as much as he does for calling people names. Image: Chris Jackson/Getty Images.
The egalitarian internet. That most open of spaces where comment is not only free, it’s rapidly becoming a bigger talking point than the original prose it responds to.
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Sacha Baron Cohen: Room For Optimism
Congratulations to Sacha Baron Cohen, who hammered what we can only hope is final nail into his ‘controversial’ career coffin last night by dumping powder over an interviewer on the red carpet at the Oscars.
Ryan Seacrest was the unfortunate victim of Baron Cohen’s pre-awards comedy skit, which basically involved the ‘Bruno’ star walking the red carpet dressed as a dictator (costume available from any good fancy dress retailer) and accidentally tipping what he claimed were the ashes of Kim Jong-Il over Seacrest’s trousers.
This would have been the hilarious, showstopping promotion tool for his new film that Baron Cohen was hoping for, but for two things. The humour to be found in fascist dictatorships is arguably limited to anyone who doesn’t buy into convenient media stereotypes, and Chumbawamba did more or less the same thing fourteen years ago to John Prescott at the Brits.
They vanished without trace shortly after. Fingers crossed, kids.
Women & Women First: My Application Is In The Post
I want to work in this bookstore, featured in the superb IRC comedy Portlandia.
Why? Well, apart from the obvious feminist credibility it would afford me, I was pioneering this customer service standard during my years in retail, way before Fred Armison and Carrie Brownstein ran with it.
My employers were strangely resistant, but I maintain it’s the only way to deal with certain ‘types’ of customers.
The place was never the same after I left, anyway.
Kelly Welles 